We spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it's intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. “the numbers”).All of our best apps roundups are written by humans who've spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software. “the words”), while Nik had built the number crunching side of things (i.e. I had contributed the “liberal arts” design side of things (i.e. It also, in a way, mirrored the skillsets of its creators. To me, this feature represents the “soul” of Soulver and it was this flexibility that allowed the tool to enable workflows we had not foreseen, and over time develop a fan base of passionate users. With this feature you could now write an expression like “$50 for lunch + $15 for the taxi” and get a useful answer. This feature seems kind of obvious in retrospect, but to my knowledge Soulver was the first tool to let you do this. It was inspiring to feel part of a community, and it was this feeling that stimulated our continued development on Soulver and our next breakthrough idea: allowing words to be used alongside numbers and calculations. Soulver app review mac#Being in the room at a real Steve Jobs keynote was a dream come true, and for the first time, we got to hang out with other Mac developers working on great “delicious” apps, like VirtueDesktops, AppZapper and CoverSutra. As university students with a decent Mac app in the world, Nik and I were fortunate to win student scholarships to WWDC, which at the time included flights, tickets & accomodation near the Moscone center. Nik began a degree in electrical engineering and computer science, while I started a bachelor of arts program, with a focus on languages, history and philosophy. We also added a stack of additional features we’d thought would make Soulver more useful, like global variables and live references to previous lines.Ī screenshot of from the Soulver website, April, 2006 Our parents thought we were nuts trying to learn C when our final high school exams were just a couple of months away! Everything turned out fine though: Nik and I topped our school in the exams, and the following April (2006) we released a new version of Soulver completely rewritten in Cocoa. Soulver app review series#Nevertheless, once a week we’d get together to work through a series of video lectures on C, bit-by-bit becoming more competent and confident programmers. Soulver app review software#This was real software engineering, and not something that seemed designed for amateur teenage coders like ourselves. First we would need to learn a notoriously low-level programming language called C, followed by yet another language called Objective-C, along with o bject-oriented programming concepts, and finally the Cocoa framework. Nik was confident we’d be able to teach ourselves Cocoa, and rewrite Soulver as a native Mac app. Soulver app review mac os x#It turned out that REALbasic was using a transitional Apple technology called Carbon under the hood, instead of the Mac OS X native framework Cocoa which produced the most beautiful apps. The problem was (we thought) that as a piece of Mac software, it didn’t feel completely native. We were disappointed to only get a few hundred downloads of the app, and less than 50 sales but we still felt we were on to something good. Me, demoing the first version of Soulver to my classmates & teachers, May 2005 It would be like a calculator, a pencil and a notepad rolled into a single tool! I drove over to Nik’s house to share my idea with him: what if the calculator was actually part of “the page”? Instead of duplicating work (first writing your expression on a pad, punching it into a calculator, and going back to the pad to write in the answer), we could stick an “answer column” to the right of a standard text editor, which would calculate line-by-line as you typed. The solution to “the calculator on computers” problem came to me in a flash of insight one morning in January. It seemed to me like the traditional calculator design that had been copied on computers just didn’t take advantage of all the power of a Mac’s graphical interface with its powerful text processing features. I couldn’t understand why it only displayed a single number at a time, and why it wouldn’t evaluate an entire mathematical expression like you’d see written out on paper. My friend Nik had built a classic calculator app over the summer as a hobby project, but I wasn’t particularly impressed. The standard Mac OS X calculator app in 2005, mimicking a physical calculator
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